Future Focused CMO: Implementing the Reading Day 1x per month creates space for growth and learning.

The Future Focused CMO: Coaching Strategies to Elevate Your Marketing Team

Future focused CMOs face a dual challenge: driving immediate results while fostering a team capable of sustained, innovative performance. As the role of the Chief Marketing Officer expands to encompass AI, ever-new technology, data, regulations, and customer experience, developing and equipping your team people is even more critical than tactics and strategies. Enabling a team to recognize emerging patterns and take advantage of nascent opportunities without fear or analysis paralysis, CMOs must adopt forward-thinking approaches to team coaching and professional development.

One strategy I have had great success with is the marketing “Reading Day.” The reading day is a deliberate and structured approach to investing in your team’s intellectual and professional growth.

The Power of Investing in Learning

Marketing professionals are often caught in a whirlwind of deadlines, campaign launches, and performance metrics. While the grind may drive results in the short term, it can stifle creativity and curiosity. Investing in learning—both individual and team-based—provides a counterbalance to this dynamic. By encouraging exploration and reflection, Future focused CMOs create a culture where growth fuels innovation, experimentation, and long-term success.

The idea is simple: prioritize learning as a core part of the job: Not as an afterthought, not relegated to off-hours, but baked into the calendar in a meaningful way.

Introducing the "Reading Day"

At the heart of this strategy is the Reading Day: one day per month where each member of the marketing team steps away from their usual responsibilities to stay home, read, research, watch, and learn about anything that sparks their curiosity and contributes to their professional development. This is not a day off. And this is not a day to scroll through brain-rot. It’s a working day where the objective is to learn.

How It Works:

Flexible Focus: Team members can choose their focus—it might be exploring a new marketing trend, diving into consumer behavior research, learning about AI tools, attending a lecture, or even reading a biography of a great leader. The key is that the employee is engaging with the material with an eye towards how it will connect to their role or the broader team goals.

Work-from-Anywhere: Reading Days are best suited to a home or quiet environment where individuals can immerse themselves without interruptions. This reinforces the idea that it’s a time for deep focus and reflection.

Accountability: This is where the magic happens. Once per quarter, the team gathers for a Learning Day. This might be a half day together in a conference room, or a whole day together off-site, or a virtual seminar. The key is that everyone prepares and delivers a short talk, presentation, or video summarizing what they learned and how it applies to their role or the company. The presentations do not have to be exhaustive or PhD level. They do have to demonstrate reflection and invite discussion. The goal is to get the marketing team thinking differently about how they do marketing.?

Why It Works

1. Reading Days Encourage Continuous Learning. The marketing landscape changes rapidly. Today’s buzzwords—generative AI, first-party data, sustainability marketing—can become tomorrow’s must-have skills. Reading Days give your team the structured space to stay ahead of the curve.
2. Sparks Cross-Pollination of Ideas. When team members present their learnings, it creates opportunities for cross-functional insights. A content marketer’s exploration of behavioral psychology might inform a new social strategy, while a demand gen specialist’s dive into data visualization could inspire the entire team. Exploring the ways B2C and D2C marketing insights may apply to a B2B world could open up new opportunities for engaging the market.?
3. Builds a Culture of Trust and Growth. By institutionalizing Reading Days, you’re sending a clear message: professional development matters and your employees don’t need to be micromanaged to be trusted to deliver insights. This is grown up marketing and team leadership. Recognizing that employees don’t need to be infantilized is critical for creating teams where people are trusted to deliver. This builds trust and loyalty while cultivating a growth mindset across the team.
4. Strengthens Team Collaboration. Learning Day presentations foster collaboration by creating a shared pool of knowledge. Team members are exposed to diverse perspectives and ideas, strengthening their sense of collective purpose.

Implementation Tips for CMOs

1. Set Clear Expectations. Explain the purpose of Reading Days and provide guidelines on how team members can make the most of their time. Ensure everyone understands that this is an opportunity, not a burden.
2. Provide Resources. Offer access to learning materials such as online courses, industry reports, books, and conferences. You might even allocate a small budget for each team member to purchase resources that align with their learning goals. If people want to order a book or attend a lecture, make it happen.
3. Create a Safe Space for Sharing. Not everyone is comfortable presenting in front of a group. Not every idea or learning is going to be profound or even very good. That’s ok! Make Learning Day presentations informal and supportive, focusing on exploration and curiosity rather than polished perfection.
4. Lead by Example. As a leader, it is imperative that you as a future-focused CMO participate in Reading Days yourself and share your learnings with the team. When CMOs model curiosity and growth, it sets a powerful tone for the entire organization.
5. Measure Impact. Track how Reading Days and Learning Days impact team performance, innovation, and morale. Look for connections between new ideas and improved outcomes in campaigns, customer engagement, or efficiency. If something is especially good or a new insight should be implemented right away, bias towards action and do it. Recognize the person / team who came up with the insight and applaud them.

The Payoff: A Future-Focused Marketing Team

Investing in your team’s growth isn’t just good for morale—it’s a strategic advantage. By fostering curiosity, collaboration, and continuous learning, you’re building a team that can adapt to change, embrace innovation, and drive sustained results. Structured programs like Reading Days ensure that learning becomes a habit, not an afterthought, while positioning your team as thought leaders within the organization and beyond.

As the Future Focused CMO, your ability to coach and elevate your team will define your success. The question isn’t whether you can afford to invest in learning—it’s whether you can afford not to.